November 30, 1835: Mark Twain is born.
Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in Missouri precisely two weeks before the perihelion of Halley’s Comet (coincidentally, he died within days of the comet’s perihelion in 1910). Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, a port town located on the Mississippi that served as the inspiration for the settings of his novels The Adventures Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At twenty-four he received his license to pilot steamboats down the Mississippi; he also received from his occupation his pen name, which was a reference to river depth. “Mark Twain” was actually one of many pen names that Twain adopted during his life. One was “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”, and another was simply “Josh”.
When the Civil War broke out, Twain was forced to drop the steamboating business and instead enlisted in a Confederate militia, albeit briefly - he quit the militia weeks later and travelled west instead, and some of these travels provided material for his first successful published work, a short story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. Through the 1870s and 80s, Twain subsequently published works like Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He also wrote several travel pieces after the success of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog”, and his satirical novel (on which he collaborated with another author) The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is the source of the term commonly applied to the period of political corruption and social problems hidden beneath economic growth following the end of Reconstruction. Twain’s satirical coming-of-age novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is commonly regarded as one of the first of the “Great American Novels”, and Twain himself was called “the father of American literature” by William Faulkner. Ernest Hemingway once remarked that “all modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called HUCKLEBERRY FINN.”
Irrelevant facts! He was good friends with Nikola Tesla, who claimed that Twain’s works had helped him recover from illness as a young man. Twain is also credited as the man who first described Helen Keller’s teacher Anne Sullivan as a “miracle worker”.